Had it not been for former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj's deep pockets, voters might never have found out about the extensive problems with the vote in Etobicoke Centre.

Photograph by: National Post files
, National Post

Voters in Etobicoke Centre are likely to vote in a byelection this year because Borys Wrzesnewskyj is both a politician and a well-to-do businessman.

Wrzesnewskyj won a landmark decision on Friday when Justice Thomas Lederer ruled that the election in Etobicoke Centre is null and void.

Unless Conservative MP Ted Opitz appeals successfully to the Supreme Court of Canada this week, he soon will be the former MP for Etobicoke Centre, and be forced to fight an election against Wrzesnewskyj again to get his job back.

Wrzesnewskyj was only able to force the byelection because he was able to spend more than $250,000 on a legal challenge.

Wrzesnewskyj thought there was something fishy about the vote, so he hired some lawyers, who filed an action in June seeking a court order to look at the sealed poll books.

In October, when they sat down at Elections Canada offices in Ottawa and opened the files, they discovered a mess.

In polling stations 31 and 426, a number of people who weren't on the voting list cast ballots. That may be fine. If you are of age, a Canadian citizen and reside in the riding you can fill out a registration certificate and be sworn in on election day.

But many certificates were missing, and the judge was not convinced they ever existed — which raises the disturbing question of why those people were ever allowed to vote.

Since Opitz "won" by 26 votes, and 79 fishy votes were found in just 10 of 236 polling stations, the judge had little choice but to overturn the result, and it's hard to imagine the Supreme Court overturning the decision.

There is no way of knowing who won the election in Etobicoke Centre, and Opitz has been sitting in the House of Commons, giving speeches and voting, without a legitimate mandate from the people of his riding, which is mind-boggling.

That's Elections Canada's fault. It doesn't matter whether there was some kind of organized attempt to get extra votes into the ballot boxes, which is something we don't know. Elections Canada has the authority and the responsibility to run clean elections, and they failed in that job.

There will always be problems, because of the nature of federal elections.

There are 65,000 polling stations across the country, and each one of them is staffed by a deputy returning officer and a poll clerk, who received about three hours of training to prepare them for their long day of handing out ballots and filling out forms.

It would be surprising if all 130,000 of those people did a good job. Mistakes will happen. It's a long day — 14 hours — and the difficult paperwork comes at the end, when the workers are tired.

In a report after the 2008 election, Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer, wrote that four of five returning officers complained that the time allotted for training was too short, so they know they must expect problems.

But if mistakes are made, and people vote who are not entitled to do so, that is not uncovered in a judicial recount. The only recourse is for a defeated candidate to sue, if they happen to have $250,000 to spare.

In this case, Wrzesnewskyj's legal team felt that Elections Canada did not bend over backwards to help them sort out the mess they made.

It's not clear whether the people running the election knew that dozens of people voted without filling out registration certificates.

The returning officer for a riding can seek to have an election thrown out, and Elections Canada investigators — the same bunch of former Mounties who are running the robocall probe — can investigate election officials who do not do their jobs.

Justice Thomas Lederer wrote that he faced a "conundrum" when he was presented with evidence of what happened in Etobicoke Centre. Our system of government relies on public confidence in the electoral process, and that confidence would be shaken if invalid voters are able to vote.

It looks like Elections Canada let that happen, at least in this riding. If it happened in other ridings, the secrets are in polling books locked in Elections Canada's archives, and we have no way of seeing them without a court order.

The Conservative government — which has long taken a confrontational approach to the agency — is under the microscope of Elections Canada investigators, and cannot expect the public to trust it to make changes to agency.

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